Fixer
by Diary
Summary: A character study of Sally Donovan. Complete.


Disclaimer: I do not own Sherlock.

…

When Sally's nine, her class gets to use the computers in the library, and she wants to look up some sort of Mexican food one of her classmates is always talking about.

That's how she finds about eating disorders, and even more disturbingly, the fact her mother might have one.

But Sally's a fixer, bossy and smart. She makes Johnny Thomas hold still while she fixes his bowtie every morning before class, puts on and removes colourful Band-Aids gentler than the nurse does, and will always help a person out with their homework, the exchange being she will lecture them for a long, long time about irresponsibility, because Sally's the type of child who has an expansive vocabulary.

"Mum," she says, that night, "I won't finish my supper unless you finish yours."

Of course, her mother tries to argue, says Sally isn't leaving until she finishes her food, she's the grownup, and Sally's the child.

Sally simply looks at her and says, "You'll need to write a note for me not having done my homework, then."

It doesn't matter that she's already done her homework and had it checked by the school librarian; it works, her mother giving up and managing to finish her too-small plate of food.

During the weekend, Sally tries to figure out the logistics of taking her mother's bathroom scale and selling it at the local pawnshop. When she can't, she sort of borrows without telling that she's borrowing the neighbour's tool kit and takes the scale apart, putting the tool kit back before anyone notices it's been borrowed.

Naturally, her mum isn't happy, but Sally is unrepentant. When her TV privileges are taken away, she makes plans to go to Shelly Lucas's house to help the other girl with her homework, confident her mother won't think to tell the Lucas's to deny her their TV.

She takes to putting notes on all the house mirrors: _You are the prettiest mum in the world!_ and _Teach Sally to be healthy; eating food is a good way to be healthy._ and _I'll take the mirrors away if you don't eat right. _

Her next step is to take a black sharpie to the nutritional information on all the food and drinks she can reach.

Finally, her mother takes her to a doctor and has the doctor convince her that her mother is stressed, does need to try to eat more regularly, but does not have an eating disorder. It takes some time, but he's a patient man, good with children, and he carefully explains things.

"Sorry, Mum," she says, later, refusing her desert.

Sighing, her mum kisses her curls and says, "I'll always be proud of you, Sally-boo. But let's just say you're not allowed to date, ever. Yeah?"

…

When she's fourteen, she starts to get an idea what her mother meant, but it doesn't do much good.

Pierce Lexington wears a leather jacket and listens to loud rap music. She tries to make him pay attention in class, tells on him when she catches him smoking, and once agrees to help him with a science project.

He kisses her, groping her breast, and she instinctively hits him in the groin and runs as fast as she can out of his house and to the bus stop.

Everyone calls her a slut, and he's not punished.

Three years later, her mum thinks she's at the library, having a rule against Sally attending parties. She finds him drunk and twitching, blood on his left thigh.

She drags him to an empty bedroom, forces bread and water in him, and cleans his thigh, smirking a bit as he whines at the impact of rubbing alcohol making contact with the cut. He tries to kiss her, again, and she holds up the scissors she found to cut the gauze with. "That would be a bad idea," she tells him.

Afterwards, at school, he talks to her, and he's nice and verging on polite as they talk.

Her mother forbids it, and her dad, who hasn't been a part of her life since he divorced her mum and went on to have babies with another woman when she was two, even comes around, trying to step in.

Sally, however, keeps talking to him and hanging around with him. He never tries to kiss her or grope her, and she can tell he's making an effort not to be crude. He tells her about his awful life at home, about the girls who never seem to like him for him, and how he feels like he doesn't have much of a future.

And Sally's always been a fixer.

She makes lunches for him and buys him coffee with her allowance, researching careers involving mechanics because he loves taking motorcycles apart and putting them back together, and holds his hand, nuzzling against him. She writes encouraging notes and helps him study. When he asks her to wear his jacket, she wears it with pride, almost bouncing as she walks through the hallways.

So, when he tries kissing her again, she lets him. She says she loves him, and after a few dates, she lets him slip his hands inside her pants. Then, one night, even though she's scared, she decides to go further. She buys the condoms and insists he use one, whispering she loves him and trying to get him to be gentler.

The next day, he mocks her at school, making it clear she was nothing special to him, and once again, she's called a slut.

Her mother comes home to find her locked in the bathroom, refusing to come out, her only response a loud, "Go away!"

Sighing, her mother goes and politely asks to borrow their neighbour's tool kit. She manages to get the door opened and pulls the shower curtain to reveal her daughter curled up in her favourite pyjamas, eyes painfully red.

It comes pouring out, and her mother takes her to a doctor.

She's not pregnant, and she doesn't have any STDs.

"Sally-boo, you're a very kind, sweet person. Someday, a nice boy is going to fall head-over-heels for you," her mum promises. "You're beautiful and talented, and anyone who doesn't see that has something wrong with them. Make this a lesson. Never waste your time on fools like that boy."

…

She becomes a police-officer, a combination of her being a fixer and her realising nursing school and pre-med aren't for her; it turns out, dissecting dead bodies isn't optional, and as much as she loves knowledge, she can't force herself to stay focused in Latin, telling her a career in law is out of the question, as well.

Greg Lestrade notices her when she embarrasses him in front of everyone.

He's higher than she is, and she ignores his untucked shirt, his hastily put on tie, and the way he almost spills coffee on himself and several other people.

Sally ignores all that, but when she notices his gun doesn't have the safety on, she's had it. "Hey!"

Marching over, she removes his gun, getting coffee on both of them in the process, puts the safety on, and goes on a ten-minute lecture. Once she's done, she frowns at him, retrieves a spare set of clothes, and changes into them, the fact she's likely to be fired catching up to her.

The firing never comes, and she goes on with life, slowly advancing in the ranks, going through a few relationships that never last. Most of the time her being both too clingy and too distant is cited as the reason for the relationship ending, and she always resolves to find someone different next time. Someone who appreciates her little notes and the meals she makes, who doesn't freak out about exchanging keys, and who appreciates the fact her career is important to her and not a regular nine-to-five job.

One day, she's patiently listening as a tiny little child clutching a stuffed toy lectures her on the massively important difference between pink lemonade and yellow when Lestrade shows up. He's a DI, now, and once the child's led away, he asks her to come be on his squad.

"Is this a joke? Payback," she inquires, tired.

"No," he answers. "How'd you know to look for the toolbox in the boy's room?"

"Mummy wouldn't open the door, neighbour had a tool box, it's not that hard to borrow them unnoticed," she answers. "He's just a kid, just wanted to help his mum."

"You seem trustworthy," he tells her. "I need that."

…

Sherlock Holmes appears, and Sally, despite her reservations, does try.

She understands procedures need to be disregarded, occasionally, and she trusts Lestrade. She can deal with rude people.

Everything falls apart when she meets the new forensic expert who introduces himself and jokes about how even his priest and wife just call him by his surname, Anderson.

He makes her laugh, and after the fifth time he comes in complaining about his coffee order being mucked up, she meets him at the coffee shop and grabs his arm, handing him the coffee he she made from the recipe she got off the internet.

Things sort of happen from there, and yes, Sally feels very guilty when she thinks of his wife. She doesn't want to be the person who does that sort of thing, and she knows she'd probably end up back in the bathtub, curled up and sobbing if someone did it to her. She certainly doesn't tell her mum when she calls, but she suspects her mum might suspect something anyways.

Anderson keeps all her little notes and even sometimes writes one back (although, his handwriting is atrocious), he loves her coffee, makes her laugh, and is very good in bed.

"He's going to end up being just like that boy you foolishly gave your virginity to when you were seventeen," Sherlock Holmes announces in the middle of the squad room one day. For a moment, she stares at him in shock, and he makes things worse by saying, "Anderson. Surely, even someone of your limited knowledge can realise..."

He goes on about her psychological defects and so on while she just stands there, completely uncomprehending of the fact it's happening, until Lestrade appears, realises what's going on, and literally gags Holmes with his tie and drags him off.

Later, she hears him yelling at Mycroft Holmes on the phone, making it clear the consulting detective won't be let out of his tiny, dark cell until Lestrade allows it.

Sally tries to calm down, but when she does, she realises it goes past her and Anderson personally.

Sherlock Holmes revealed an affair with no cause. He said he believed her to be mentally deficient, and then, he verbally tore her down.

It wasn't for a case, and it wasn't something like him having a moral belief that compelled him to tell Mrs Anderson. Something like that, she could understand. Things are often revealed during cases, though law enforcement is supposed to be discreet, and acknowledging her own hypocrisy, if she knew someone was being cheated on, she'd probably tell them.

But she can easily imagine him revealing a person's homosexuality or the fact they had a termination or had struggled with an eating disorder or self-harm with no good reason other than a desire to bring them down or just to show off he's clever, uncaring how it would destroy them. She could easily imagine him driving some person to suicide with just his words, and a person like that is a psychopath.

Her opinion doesn't waver when she realises how much pleasure he gets in performing experiments on corpses.

Lestrade values her, but he values Sherlock Holmes more, and he begs her not to transfer, promising her many things but drawing the line when she insists she just wants the psychopath gone. Take away his access, bar him from crime scenes, and never let him near another case.

One day, she snaps, "Freak," and Lestrade looks as if he wants to scold her.

Holmes distracts him, however, and the name sticks.

Anderson calls him it in private. She does it in public, and no one really reacts.

…

John Watson isn't someone she'd want to date, but he's nice enough.

Soon after she first meets him, she catches him watching her and Anderson with an odd expression.

"Your mate's already tried to shame us," she tells him, sharply, in private. "Exposed us to the whole bloody station; it's a wonder his wife didn't find out. If he'd told her, I couldn't blame him, not really, but that's just being a dick. Worse than, even. How'd you think she'd have felt if someone had rung her up and told her what he'd announced to everyone?"

"I- What you do isn't my business," he says, awkwardly. "And I'm sorry. Sherlock doesn't seem to have much in the way of social skills, does he?"

"I meant what I said," she replies, unsympathetically. "He's a psychopath, and a man is dead. I know, forensics cleared him, but it doesn't sit right with me that the world's supposed great detective can't tell who killed the man he was in a room with. Watch yourself, Doctor."

He doesn't listen, seems like he might be half in love with Sherlock Holmes, but he's polite when they come around, talking to her about cases and inconsequential things. He's polite to Anderson, too, and occasionally, the three of them will have a laugh.

…

A year and a half later, she's in the middle of switching methods and the bloody condom breaks.

When he appears in the waiting room, holding what she recognises as her chart, she tries to bolt, but his limp gone, he's faster, catching her wrist.

"It's okay," he assures her. "Come on. Let's get this over with, and then, I'll buy the drinks. We can both get pissed and pretend this never happened."

They do, and he gives her the good news of no pregnancy. She has a feeling Holmes knows, and she waits.

When he never says anything, never does anything besides giving her knowing looks, she wonders if John Watson has tamed him. Maybe the psychopath is human, maybe he can just be controlled; either way, she tentatively starts to hope maybe there won't be a body someday, courtesy of him.

…

The thing is, Sally's always been a fixer, but she can't fix any of this.

Sherlock Holmes came through, just as she always knew he would, put a body on the ground, left it for the police. He committed the crime, left the body, and they get to deal with it.

He did it for John, for his landlady, and for Lestrade. Their mutual friend, a woman she's never had a personal conversation with, and her boss, the man who admired her skills and caring and brashness.

She tries to transfer, and Lestrade snaps, "You got what you wanted, Sally. Leave it."

Managing not to cry, she gives her transfer request to Dimmock.

"Sergeant," Lestrade says as she's about to leave, "I threw something in the rubbish bin that needs to be shredded. Would you mind getting it? I marked it in pink."

If it weren't for the fact she's leaving permanently, feels guilty, and still greatly admires him, she'd report him, but instead, she goes over to the thankfully clean bin and digs through several papers until she finds her transfer request a big, pink _No!_ taking over the whole front page.

She shreds the forms and unpacks her box of personal effects.

…

Later, the urge to shoot the not-dead man is almost too hard to control.

Instead, she takes a breath and says, "I'll get the drawing board, sir."

John's surprised. "You're going to-"

"Of course, I'm going to help," she snaps. "You," she says, looking at Holmes, who looks completely unsurprised by her words, "are still a freak, and I still don't think you can be trusted. But you did form an elaborate plan to save your mate, your landlady, and my boss; so, one way or another, I am going to see this Moran fellow brought down."

"You can't bring Anderson in," John warns.

"She knows, John," Lestrade assures him, and Sherlock nods.

As she goes to get the drawing board, there's a moment of doubt.

This could ruin her relationship (to a married man), it could get her thrown in prison, it could get her killed, it could put her mum in danger, and she knows there's a possibility Lestrade and John could lose control of Sherlock Holmes at any point. He might have been willing to fake commit suicide to save them, but he also almost got Lestrade's career ruined and did hold a loaded gun to his best mate's head.

There's a moment of doubt, but she sighs, grabs a tool kit from her desk, and returns with the board, because Sally's a fixer, bossy, smart, and willing to be rashly stupid when it comes to the important things.


End file.
